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New approaches in university staff development: Training for efficiency in teaching, research and management
156
BOOK REVIEWS
Through such experiences, and subsequent reading on the themes of education and development, she became committed to the importance of non-formal education in promoting ‘alternative’ models of development. Polemical tracts often make for lively and thoughtprovoking reading. However, when they are conceptually confused and devoid of any serious cogent argument; when they simply reproduce a previous decade’s rhetoric; and when they are littered with factual errors and so many proof-reading errors as to make comprehension at times impossible, then they are, frankly, very irritating. She begins with an overview of the education and development literature, declaring her allegiance firmly to the dependency perspective before proceeding to provide a brief synopsis of the history of education in Papua New Guinea. Following a list of her reasons for promoting nonformal education, she moves to chapters which provide, first, brief descriptions of a number of non-formal education initiatives reported in the literature and, second, a very much longer personal account of five library extension projects that she had initiated in the 1970s. The author’s account of her personal experiences is a complete travesty of the case-study research method that she claims it to be (p. 2). With the exception of the percentage of books lost from a loan scheme, there appeared to be no systematic attempt to collect any data relating to an evaluation of these projects. Instead the reader is provided with a description of the various schemes and extracts from policy documents, together with the reproduction of a seriesof letters. Most of the latter, written to the author, were congratulatory in tone, but two more critical ones are included to illustrate that project implementation was not completely plain sailing: ‘two letters reveal a high degree of frustration . . . both are evidence of a usually concealed clash of cultures. Was there, perhaps, two [sic] much ‘top-down’ organization, complicated by the fact that foreign women were in positions of power over local men?’ (p. 46). At this point the reader obtains a rare glimpse of the kinds of issues which case-study methodology, properly executed, might have been particularly well suited to analyse. As a final observation, it does seem extraordinary that anyone could write a monograph on the theory and practice of non-formal education in Papua New Guinea without reference either to any of the research reports published by the University of Papua New Guinea’s Educational Research Unit or to any articles in the Papua New Guineu JOIUM~ of Educarion (now in its 24th volume). There have been about a dozen ERU research reports containing research findings on aspects of non-formal education in the decade since the author left Papua New Guinea, whilst the journal has published not only articles but bibliographies of non-formal education policy and research papers. Little wonder, therefore, that she comments, as one of her many justifications for a dependency perspective, that ‘in examining research from Papua New Guunea [sic] it will be noticed that very few of the researchers have non-European names’ (p. 22). GRAHAM VULLIAMY University of York
New Approaches in University Staff Development: Training for Efficiency in TePching, Rese8rch 8nd MPn8geIWItt: R.
Rottenburg (ed.) Zentralsrelle fiir Erziehung, Wissenschaft und Dokumentation, Bonn. Any activity which fosters cooperation between African universities should be applauded. This international. conference seems to have been very successful in bringing together university administrators from Eastern Africa and representatives of aid agencies for an exchange of views and experience. German, Dutch and British contriblitors described their various forms of staff development as an introduction to the wide-ranging discussion of the problems faced by African universities. This started with a paper by Prof. D. Ekong of the Association of African Universities on their historical development and a session on ‘How African Are African Universities?‘Then the administrators representing eight African universities (from Ethiopia to Zimbabwe) had an opportunity to comment on their own history and staff development. The major focus so far has been sending promising young scholars abroad for further training, but increasing demands for more local training have been fuelled by economic constraints and the need for more locally-relevant research. The major controversy of the conference seems to have been the division between a few Africans who held the extreme view that all overseas training should be stopped as irrelevant to local needs and a few Germans and other Africans who argued that training abroad still had much to offer. It is interesting to note that training in other African countries was never mentioned, though this would help to solve the serious problem of inbreeding if all staff training is done locally by a small and impecunious university. Few lecturers at European or American universities received all of their academic training internally. Similarly, comments on expatriate staff assumed that these were all from industrialized countries, when in recent years quite a few academics have moved from one African country to another. The value of an ‘outside’, though African, approach to both teaching and research should be considered. Other aspects of staff training, such as programmes to improve teaching, research, and administration and staff appraisal are not yet widely available, though the University of Zimbabwe has established a University Teaching and Learning Methods Unit to develop a broad programme and the University of Dar es Salaam reported on its student assessment of teaching. The problem of separating carrot from stick in staff assessment has yet to be faced. Unfortunately, rhetoric occasionally got in the way of reality, with comments such as ‘in industrialized countries, competence in research develops automatically among university staff (p. 146). The unchallenged statement that ‘African people try to find their own origins only since independence’ (p. 73) pointed to the unfortunate absence of West Africans, with their different background, from the discussion. The detailed proposals of the working groups were more practical in trying to draw up programmes which could be followed, but there is still rather too much abstract generalization on what should be done in an ideal world (including lists of desiderata for donor agencies rather than specific recommendations on what could be done first. However, the conference obviously provided the participants (both administrators and donor representatives) with ideas, and the book is probably most useful for them. MARGARET PEIL University of Birminghom,
U.K.
BOOK REVIEWS
Through such experiences, and subsequent reading on the themes of education and development, she became committed to the importance of non-formal education in promoting ‘alternative’ models of development. Polemical tracts often make for lively and thoughtprovoking reading. However, when they are conceptually confused and devoid of any serious cogent argument; when they simply reproduce a previous decade’s rhetoric; and when they are littered with factual errors and so many proof-reading errors as to make comprehension at times impossible, then they are, frankly, very irritating. She begins with an overview of the education and development literature, declaring her allegiance firmly to the dependency perspective before proceeding to provide a brief synopsis of the history of education in Papua New Guinea. Following a list of her reasons for promoting nonformal education, she moves to chapters which provide, first, brief descriptions of a number of non-formal education initiatives reported in the literature and, second, a very much longer personal account of five library extension projects that she had initiated in the 1970s. The author’s account of her personal experiences is a complete travesty of the case-study research method that she claims it to be (p. 2). With the exception of the percentage of books lost from a loan scheme, there appeared to be no systematic attempt to collect any data relating to an evaluation of these projects. Instead the reader is provided with a description of the various schemes and extracts from policy documents, together with the reproduction of a seriesof letters. Most of the latter, written to the author, were congratulatory in tone, but two more critical ones are included to illustrate that project implementation was not completely plain sailing: ‘two letters reveal a high degree of frustration . . . both are evidence of a usually concealed clash of cultures. Was there, perhaps, two [sic] much ‘top-down’ organization, complicated by the fact that foreign women were in positions of power over local men?’ (p. 46). At this point the reader obtains a rare glimpse of the kinds of issues which case-study methodology, properly executed, might have been particularly well suited to analyse. As a final observation, it does seem extraordinary that anyone could write a monograph on the theory and practice of non-formal education in Papua New Guinea without reference either to any of the research reports published by the University of Papua New Guinea’s Educational Research Unit or to any articles in the Papua New Guineu JOIUM~ of Educarion (now in its 24th volume). There have been about a dozen ERU research reports containing research findings on aspects of non-formal education in the decade since the author left Papua New Guinea, whilst the journal has published not only articles but bibliographies of non-formal education policy and research papers. Little wonder, therefore, that she comments, as one of her many justifications for a dependency perspective, that ‘in examining research from Papua New Guunea [sic] it will be noticed that very few of the researchers have non-European names’ (p. 22). GRAHAM VULLIAMY University of York
New Approaches in University Staff Development: Training for Efficiency in TePching, Rese8rch 8nd MPn8geIWItt: R.
Rottenburg (ed.) Zentralsrelle fiir Erziehung, Wissenschaft und Dokumentation, Bonn. Any activity which fosters cooperation between African universities should be applauded. This international. conference seems to have been very successful in bringing together university administrators from Eastern Africa and representatives of aid agencies for an exchange of views and experience. German, Dutch and British contriblitors described their various forms of staff development as an introduction to the wide-ranging discussion of the problems faced by African universities. This started with a paper by Prof. D. Ekong of the Association of African Universities on their historical development and a session on ‘How African Are African Universities?‘Then the administrators representing eight African universities (from Ethiopia to Zimbabwe) had an opportunity to comment on their own history and staff development. The major focus so far has been sending promising young scholars abroad for further training, but increasing demands for more local training have been fuelled by economic constraints and the need for more locally-relevant research. The major controversy of the conference seems to have been the division between a few Africans who held the extreme view that all overseas training should be stopped as irrelevant to local needs and a few Germans and other Africans who argued that training abroad still had much to offer. It is interesting to note that training in other African countries was never mentioned, though this would help to solve the serious problem of inbreeding if all staff training is done locally by a small and impecunious university. Few lecturers at European or American universities received all of their academic training internally. Similarly, comments on expatriate staff assumed that these were all from industrialized countries, when in recent years quite a few academics have moved from one African country to another. The value of an ‘outside’, though African, approach to both teaching and research should be considered. Other aspects of staff training, such as programmes to improve teaching, research, and administration and staff appraisal are not yet widely available, though the University of Zimbabwe has established a University Teaching and Learning Methods Unit to develop a broad programme and the University of Dar es Salaam reported on its student assessment of teaching. The problem of separating carrot from stick in staff assessment has yet to be faced. Unfortunately, rhetoric occasionally got in the way of reality, with comments such as ‘in industrialized countries, competence in research develops automatically among university staff (p. 146). The unchallenged statement that ‘African people try to find their own origins only since independence’ (p. 73) pointed to the unfortunate absence of West Africans, with their different background, from the discussion. The detailed proposals of the working groups were more practical in trying to draw up programmes which could be followed, but there is still rather too much abstract generalization on what should be done in an ideal world (including lists of desiderata for donor agencies rather than specific recommendations on what could be done first. However, the conference obviously provided the participants (both administrators and donor representatives) with ideas, and the book is probably most useful for them. MARGARET PEIL University of Birminghom,
U.K.